Three small lunar rovers were packed up at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the first leg of their multistage journey to the Moon. These suitcase-size rovers, along with a base station and camera system that will record their travels on the lunar surface, make up NASA’s CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) technology demonstration.<br /><br />CADRE aims to prove that a group of robots can collaborate to gather data without receiving direct commands from mission controllers on Earth, paving the way for potential future multirobot missions. <br /><br />Seen here are tests of the CADRE software in January 2024 and scenes of a rover getting flipped over, attached to an aluminum plate for transit, and sealed into a protective metal-frame enclosure that was later packed into a metal shipping container a year later, in January 2025.<br /><br />The hardware was transported from JPL to Intuitive Machines’ Houston facility, where it will be integrated with the company’s Nova-C lander. Intuitive Machines’ third lunar mission (IM-3), which has a mission window extending into early 2026, will deliver CADRE and other NASA payloads to the Moon’s Reiner Gamma region. <br /><br />JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages CADRE for the Game Changing Development program within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. IM-3 is a mission under NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative, which is managed by the agency’s Science Mission Directorate.